A Comparison Study for Disaster Tweet Classification Using Deep Learning Models

Soudabeh Taghian Dinani, Doina Caragea

Abstract: Effectively filtering and categorizing the large volume of user-generated content on social media during disaster events can help emergency management and disaster response prioritize their resources. Deep learning approaches, including recurrent neural networks and transformer-based models, have been previously used for this purpose. Capsule Neural Networks (CapsNets), initially proposed for image classification, have been proven to be useful for text analysis as well. However, to the best of our knowledge, CapsNets have not been used for classifying crisis-related messages, and have not been extensively compared with state-of-the-art transformer-based models, such as BERT. Therefore, in this study, we performed a thorough comparison between CapsNet models, state-of-the-art BERT models and two popular recurrent neural network models that have been successfully used for tweet classification, specifically, LSTM and Bi-LSTM models, on the task of classifying crisis tweets both in terms